a personal-public notebook about human development(s) ... by michaela raab

Monday, 12 October 2015

Good things happen in the short term and bad things happen in the long term

This is a long title but I love that
sentence, culled from Elliot Stern’s intervention on the Benefits and Barriers to Evaluation Use at the recent evaluation
conference in Paris. The one-day conference, convened jointly by the European
Evaluation Society, France’s evaluation society, the United Nations
Organisation for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO) and the Organisation
for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), took place at the quite extraordinary
UNESCO headquarters in Paris.

There, you stand in an average foyer, sipping
your average coffee break coffee, and all of a sudden you realise you
are gazing at Giacometti’s Walking Man. Then you turn around and raise your eyes to see
Picasso’s giant mural Fall of Icare, a few tables and chairs scattered at its feet. (Both
are important works of European 20th century art, for those who are
not into that stuff.)

The title of
the conference was Making Effective Use
of Evaluations in an Increasingly Complex World. I wonder whether the real
world has ever been simple. In any case, I have always known it as a complex
place. Complexity means that all kinds of things happen; there are many causes
and many effects, reinforcing or weakening each other in many ways, and the
effects of what we do (or refrain from doing) are unpredictable and often long
term.

That is quite different from the simpler,
fictitious world of results-based management (RBM), practised in development
agencies as a way to (mentally) arrange activities, their direct products and
hoped-for outcomes in neat pyramids or chains leading to the desired goal. In
that world, activities produce planned outputs, outputs lead to outcomes and in
the end impact happens. The time horizon of the logical framework rarely
extends beyond the project it describes. Such linear logical chains come in handy when you present a project or programme to others. That is why they are quite mandatory in applications for funding from United Nations
organisations, the European Commission and other development funders.

How much sense does that kind of thinking make
for development interventions that are increasingly trying to change
institutional and national behaviour, people’s assumptions and social norms? As
pointed out in Stern’s speech, those kinds of changes happen as a result of a
confusing array of factors; they are slow and difficult to measure. The
intervention you devise might be good in the short term, but contribute to bad,
sometimes unexpected changes in the longer term. If, for instance, the goal is to end
gender-based violence (GBV) in a place where no-one even talks about the issue,
what kind of result can one reasonably expect within three years? I can think
of a couple (like, getting a discussion on GBV going), but one will only come up
with reasonable ideas if one thinks way beyond the logical framework of your
project, examining the different factors likely to support or block our cause
– during the lifetime of the project and
in the longer run.

The mismatch between the results chain
logic and real life tempts people in development projects to forget about
logical frameworks once the project is approved. That doesn't mean people are
bad at monitoring, evaluation and learning. For example, human rights
activists I have worked with constantly monitor national policies,
jurisprudence, police (non-) action, the media and so forth, and reflect on what that means for their work. That is, they keep
watching people and things that are not part of the project but that massively
influence the human rights situation. Arguably, those aspects are more important for
human rights in their country than the chain of events foreseen in its logical
framework. Of course, on top of all that they’d better check, every so often,
whether the activists’ own activities do contribute to the expected results. But
it would be unreasonable to expect them to devote all their monitoring and
learning efforts to that small fraction of the wider change they wish to
contribute to.

I would advocate for project/programme planning and monitoring that looks
beyond the confines of simple results chains or results frameworks. Summarising project
activities and aspirations in an RBM-style tree diagram or matrix is fine. But to plan and manage a project wisely, it is
important to keep an eye on people and actions around you. Questioning the
assumptions behind the causal connections in your log frame, mapping actors and
assessing risks are relatively simple, useful things one should do, both
when planning a project and when assessing its progress.

Back on-line!

Apologies to all those who have tried to post comments since mid-2017! I have been too terribly busy to review and authorise the comments in good time. (This blog is a free-time venture after all.)

Meanwhile, the European Commission's General Data Protection Regulation has come into force and it has become complicated to display comments. To stay on the safe side, I have deleted all comments ever posted to this blog. I am very sorry about that, because I have enjoyed this form of conversation. And I do hope you will enjoy reading future posts all the same.

About me

I am a consultant with some 30 years of experience in development - in particular, monitoring & evaluation, facilitation, training and applied research with a range of organisations and in many places around the world. I live in Berlin and work in several languages.This blog is a free time venture - so please bear with typos and occasional long waits between the posts.

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